The goal of the Learning Journey Platform is to make Learning Power improvement accessible to anyone with a smart device. Helping everyone to succeed not only in their study, but also in their work and in the community.

From Classroom to Boardroom – Learning Power drives success

Developed through 18 years of academic research, the Learning Power platform and previous versions have been used over 120,000 times to help individuals and teams improve their capacity to learn.

With the ability to support multiple languages and tones of voice tailored to each audience, it is a unique capability that enables continuous Learning Power improvement throughout the journey of a learner – from school, to college, to university and into work.

It’s also a powerful tool for supporting community engagement – addressing shared problems that matter.

With an obvious home in Education, the Learning Journey Platform is increasingly being used by Business around the world to improve performance by increasing the Learning Power of individuals, teams and organisations, enabling them to transform, adapt and succeed.

Its a new and unique opportunity to build sustainable Learning Power improvement into individual and organisational learning.

The Platform’s features and benefits

It is more than just a diagnostic tool – itsupports the entire Learning Power improvement cycle,from purpose to performance.

It is‘always on’– the platform is constantly available to provide new and rapid feedback, not just a one-off assessment

It isaccessibleandeasyto use

Itsupports and informs coaches and leaders as well as their teams

It generates a rich and growing data set to drivecollaborative research, development andcontinuous improvement

Without purpose, learning is a journey without a destination

The first stage in any learning journey is understanding why you are attempting something – establishing purpose. The platform makes this very simple, guiding you through a series of questions that tease out the purpose.

Discovering your personal Learning Power profile

Next, the platform takes you through the Learning Power profile, answering simple questions about how you think, feel and behave while learning. Based on these answers, a personalised Learning Power profile is generated, helping you to understand your capacity to learn based on eight dimensions of learning.

Improving your Learning Power

Being able to improve your Learning Power is at the heart of the platform. By identifying which learning power dimensions to improve, you give a new shape to your profile, creating a visual target for your improvement plan.

The platform makes this easy by enabling you to drag and stretch your selected dimension scores on the spider diagram of your Learning Power profile and by prompting and recording the improvement strategies you create which enable you to achieve your targets.

Doing something about it…

The next step is also simple, but often overlooked – it’s about putting a plan into action and doing something differently, to practice and improve your Learning Power. We call this Doing The Job. It is when Learning Power is used in action to build new knowledge, achieve goals and create new value.

Lending a helping hand

To help you on your journey, we have created your own ‘buddy’ that will offer personalised help along the way.

Offering helpful hints and tips, this will make sure you get the most out of your learning journey.

Tracking progress

The last step in any learning journey is to measure the progress made against your learning objectives.

The platform makes it easy to retrieve and compare previous learning power profiles and to track your progress over time.

Unique access to learning data

The platform also provides access to the underlying data to enable valuable analytical insights, for coaches and leaders, of the individual and group feedback.

Access to this level of learner data is ground-breaking as it allows for integration with wider data sets for further analytical insight and to drive Research and Development opportunities.

By engaging with customers to understand how we can learn together to create a more sustainable water future, rather than by telling customers what the ‘water-wise rules’ are, the early indications are that enough customers are changing their water use behaviour.

Dr Jim Bentley is sprinkling his customers with love in a new campaign to save water, encouraging residents of Newcastle and the Hunter region to think twice before turning on the tap. Hunter Water has challenged the traditional ways of thinking for infrastructure providers and monopoly utility businesses. This has opened up more adaptive, incremental and innovative opportunities as we now value ‘keeping our options open’ overbuilding certainty too soon. As a result, Hunter Water has reduced the volume of water loss from their system by nearly 20% in a little over two years and embarked on a range of initiatives and engagement approaches with our community under the Love Water banner.

Here Jim describes the changes at Hunter Water to The CEO Magazine

Jim: One of the most exciting things has been to understand how we could become a learning organisation. We wanted to change the relationship we have with our customers and bring about a different kind of water future, and apply those principles to our messaging in terms of how we use water.

A lot of utilities in Australia talk about water-wise rules and how you must comply with them. So, I looked at hope and optimism,belonging, curiosity, creativity, and realised that telling people what to do all the time doesn’t tick any of those boxes. I told our marketing team to go away and come back with the outline of a campaign around people’s water behaviour without mentioning rules.

“I told our marketing team to go away and come back with the outline of a campaign around people’s water behaviour without mentioning rules.”

What was the result?

The result was going from Water Wise Rules to Love Water, a brand we use for events and sponsorship. It’s two blue water droplets in the shape of a heart, which sounds very twee but fundamentally is a signal to us, our community and customers that we’re all in this together.

The kind of events we sponsor now are very different. Rather than sponsoring big macho things like the rugby league, we sponsor Music in the Podium at Lake Macquarie, where thousands of people from the community enjoy light music by a beautiful lake.

It’s very different, less about strength and robustness and more about togetherness and belonging.

The relationship we have with those stakeholders and partners has been transformational, while the message to our community is that we’re not here to tell you what to do, but we’re here to learn and build with you.

It’s been amazing how this has taken off throughout our organisation in each department.

If it was just a piece of marketing it would be a bit naff, but this is the very essence of how we are working with people under the Love Water banner, which all links back to those learning power principles.

What is the best piece of advice you have been given or heard?

To help people connect with purpose. At an organisational level, spending time understanding and communicating what we’re here for and why it matters has always paid off for me. And at an individual level, working with colleagues to help them identify their purpose and values, and how these align with the organisation’s purpose, has often proved to be very powerful.

Why does this matter?

Complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity are the three most important capabilities for thriving in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. These are not traditionally developed through legacy learning and development systems (human or digital)because they require real-world, purposeful problems and contexts, the ability to work across silos, new measurement models and courageous leadership. Learning design for teachers is about creating the conditions where students can take responsibility for their own learning by invoking their own passion and purpose and the agency to pursue these through a learning journey in contexts where the outcome is not known in advance

What are we measuring?

The most important unit of change is the story and identity of the learner – not the teacher, the curriculum or the measurement model. Legacy systems tend to privilege the content of the curriculum, a reductionist measurement model and the teacher as agent of change. The challenge for learning analytics is to build a digital infrastructure based on a data architecture which provides a ‘single view of the learner’, where data belongs to the learner and can be used, one student at a time, across transitions, and in real-time, for better decision-making as they navigate their way through complex problems to solutions that matter to them. This is sometimes described as a call to move towards Education 3.0 – a challenging worldview shift from a top down, individualist and dualistic worldview (Education 1.0) towards an integral, participatory and wholistic one. For a discussion about these ideas see the first Handbook for Learning Analytics and a chapter called Layers, Loops and Processes.

What this Post is About

I want to focus on the challenges and opportunities of building such a Digital Learning Infrastructure and will use examples from the new Learning Emergence Learning Journey Platform. The first release of the platform is live with a group of schools in the UK and with another group of schools in the Hunter, NSW, sponsored by Hunter Water Corporation. Hunter Water are using the same Learning Journey Platform as a vehicle for cultural transformation as they move into the uncertainty and challenges of infrastructure resilience and sustainability for the future of the region.

The Learning Journey Platform

The purpose of the Learning Journey Platform is to enhance self-directed learning capabilities, and thus the resilient agency, of students, teachers and leaders and schools across the world. It provides scaffolding support for people in authentic enquiry learning journeys which contribute measurably to data-informed local solutions that matter and empower self-directed, resilient learners. ‘Learning Power’ is a term which describes this approach. Resilient people are a pre-requisite for resilient and sustainable practices at all levels of society. See this link for an introduction.

Loops – feedback and feedforward

Rapid feedback of meaningful data is key to enhancing self-directed learning. The Learning Journey Platform hosts the CLARA learning power assessment tool, the TESAteacher development tool for pedagogy which supports deep student engagement and Angela Duckworth’s GRIT survey. Feedback to the user is immediate and provides a framework for reflection – ‘backwards’ towards identity and purpose and ‘forwards’ to a particular purposeful outcome.

The Learning Journey Platform aggregates anonymised data in real time for coaches, teachers and leaders to interrogate in different ways. This capability is possible because of the underlying data architecture which allows for a ‘single view of the learner’. The data belongs to the learner and they can take their learningjourneys with them from school to school and on to University and into the work place

Processes – the learning journey

A key design principle underpinning the Learning Journey Platform is that learning is a journey that begins with a purpose and moves towards an outcome or ‘performance’ of some sort. When a student defines and owns their own purpose – the why – they are at the beginning of resilient agency. They need to use their learning dispositions – their learning power – to understand themselves as learners and to figure out how to move towards their purpose. The what is the data, information, experience and new knowledge they need to identify, collect, curate and re-construct in order to achieve their purpose. This is a familiar enquiry cycle for most educators – the key difference here is the emphasis on purpose and agency and self-directed navigation. It’s also a process that is core to improvement science approaches.

The learning journey metaphor is simple and yet profound in terms of mind-set shifts. A person leads a journey, you can be on your own or with others, there’s a terrain, a map if you’re lucky, challenges, diversions and a destination. Journeys have endings and beginnings and way-points, and come in all shapes and sizes.

The Learning Journey Platform builds on best practice in data architecture from FinTech in customer journeys and uses AI to support the individual learner in navigating their learning. Whereas in the commercial world the focus is on the ‘next best action’, in the world of learning the focus is on the ‘next best offer’. Dialogue and discourse are at the heart of learning.

Layers – students, teachers, leaders, system leaders

Schools are complex living systems which are multi-layered. We know how important teacher professional learning is – you can’t give what you haven’t got. Moving towards education 3.0 means to be part of a worldview shift which is happening around us because of the challenges of life in the 21C. A worldview shift of this type is uncomfortable and challenging. It’s best encountered and managed through deep professional learning – for leaders and teachers. The Learning Journey Platform captures the data, analyses it and returns aggregated anonymised data as feedback to teachers and leaders for more focused interventions and better decision making. Personal data is only viewed by another person with explicit permission: it belongs to the Learner.

What Next

The focus for the next stage of the Learning Journey Platform is on enhancing the use of AI to support purposeful conversations – enhancing, not replacing, the face to face relationships of trust, affirmation and challenge that are at the heart of learning. ‘Buddy’ already asks questions and ‘calls time’ for reflection at key junctures in each journey and he’ll get cleverer as time goes by. The second focus is on developing support and scaffolding for a whole authentic enquiry project.

The Learning Journey Platform is available for use by schools and HE in this phase of development. Its capability to collect and integrate data around rapid cycles of enquiry make it an ideal candidate to support professional learning and improvement science approaches to educational transformation. Its partnership with Declara – social learning and knowledge curation – mean that through the INSIGHTS tab capability users can access ‘knowledge pathways’ – units of relevant learning material which sit within Declara. The potential for scaling up professional learning across geographies and time is significant.

This sort of education innovation requires new business models that allow for collaboration, innovation and evolution. The Learning Emergence Partnership is developing a wholistic approach where the same learning design principles are used in industry for cultural transformation both in terms of employees and different types of users and customers. In between education and industry there is ‘community engagement’ and ‘vocational education’. Our vision is to make this work accessible for all schools, working with both industry and philanthropy. Learning Emergence has an asset locked Foundation to ensure this.

We’re delighted to announce a Special Section of the Journal of Learning Analytics, published this week, focusing on the challenge of Learning Analytics for 21st Century Competencies. In our editorial we introduce the nature of the challenge, and after summarising the different researcher and practitioner papers, propose a complex systems approach which takes seriously the ‘layers, loops and processes’ of learning infrastructures and the iterative relationship between the human and the digital, where people learn at the nodes of networked flows of information.

Learning analytics is an emerging field powered by the paradigm shifts of the information age. Pedagogy and learning that produce students capable of thriving in conditions of complexity, risk, and challenge by taking responsibility for their own learning journeys, and using technology and analytics to scaffold this process is at the heart of the challenge. It is an emergent field, still struggling to find its way. These papers represent a unique ‘window’ into this programme from the viewpoint of both users and researchers.

You can enjoy full access to all the articles, since JLA is an open access journal.

I gave an overview of the topic and some of the papers in the above volume in this talk to the Asian Learning Analytics Summer Institute, with thanks to Yong-Sang Cho and the LASI-Asia team for the kind invitation…